There is a particular kind of meeting happening in Indian marketing departments right now. Someone senior asks how the brand is going to target audiences once third-party cookies are gone and the DPDP Act restricts how data can be collected and used. The room goes quiet. Then someone mentions that they should probably talk to the tech team. The tech team says they should probably talk to the agency. The agency says they should probably talk to the data vendor. And the data vendor says they should have started this conversation eighteen months ago.
First-party data is not a new concept. Brands have been told to invest in it for years. What changed is that the deadline for doing so got real. The combination of cookie deprecation and India’s own data protection framework means that the passive approach — buying audience data from third parties and leaving your own customer data sitting underused in a CRM — is no longer viable.
What first, second, and third-party data actually mean
These terms get used interchangeably in conversations where they should not be.
First-Party
Data you collected directly from your own customers — purchase history, app behaviour, email sign-ups, loyalty programme activity. You own it. It is the most valuable and the most trustworthy.
Second-Party
Someone else’s first-party data, shared with you through a partnership. A telecom company sharing subscriber data with a bank, for example. Requires explicit agreements and increasingly, regulatory compliance.
Third-Party
Data collected by an external company — often via browser cookies or device tracking — and sold across the ecosystem. This is what is disappearing. And it is what most programmatic targeting has depended on.
When the advertising industry talks about the “cookieless future,” what it really means is the end of third-party data as a default. The infrastructure that allowed a brand to follow a user from one website to another, build a profile, and serve them a targeted ad — without that user ever knowingly interacting with the brand — is being dismantled.
The Indian context: DPDP adds a layer
India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act is not the same as GDPR and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not require. At its core, it mandates that individuals must give explicit, informed consent before their personal data is collected. Brands must state what data they are collecting, why, and for how long they will keep it. Individuals have the right to withdraw consent and have their data erased.
For most brands, this is not catastrophic — provided they build proper consent mechanisms into their digital touchpoints. What it does rule out is the casual, assumed data collection that has been standard practice in Indian digital marketing. The cookie banner that no one reads and that defaults to accepting everything is not going to hold up.
Where first-party data actually comes from
The brands that are in the best position right now built their first-party data strategies years ago, often without calling them that. They launched loyalty programmes, not because of data strategy, but because they wanted repeat customers. They built apps that made transactions easier. They ran email programmes that people actually wanted to receive.
The data those activities generated turned out to be extraordinarily valuable. Purchase frequency, product preferences, browsing behaviour within owned apps, response to promotional offers — this is a profile that no third-party data vendor can replicate because it is built from actual behaviour with actual consent.
For brands starting this journey now, the entry points are: a well-designed loyalty programme, email and SMS opt-in flows with genuine value exchange, a branded app with behavioural data collection, and offline-to-online linking through programmes that connect in-store purchase behaviour to digital identity.
What you can do with it in advertising
First-party data is most powerful when it informs programmatic targeting. Uploading your customer list to a DSP or to Meta’s Custom Audiences allows you to serve ads specifically to your existing customers — for cross-sell, upsell, or retention. Creating lookalike audiences from your best customers is among the most efficient prospecting approaches in digital advertising.
Clean room technology is emerging as the solution for brands that want to combine their first-party data with platform data without either party handing over raw data files. Google, Amazon, and several Indian adtech platforms now offer clean room environments. This is where sophisticated Indian marketers will be operating within two years.
The honest time estimate
If you are starting a first-party data strategy today, you will not have meaningful scale for at least 12 to 18 months. You need to build the collection touchpoints, earn the consent, accumulate the data, and then build the systems to activate it in advertising.
That timeline is uncomfortable, which is why many brands keep postponing the start. But the brands that started 18 months ago are already using their first-party data as a competitive advantage. Every month you wait is a month of data you will never have.
